A Short Walk in the Double Ditch Kush.

 

The dog said, "get off the couch, Bob."

 

 

"There's tons of deer in the pasture.

 

 

Look in the river,



 

 

 

the trout are as big as aligators. Everwhere you look,

 

 

 

the colors are amazing."





They Eat Cars, Don't They.

 

We wandered off the river and and the dog said, don't go there. 

(click on pics to enlarge)

A '48 Pontiac screamed for help

 

Bushes strangled an innocent '56 Ford

 

 

Behind the '55 Roadmasher a mystery car was breaking away

 

 

The dog said it was a Terraplane.  But I'm not sure.

 

 

 

 

Poachers!!!!

(click to enlarge) 

The dog said let's walk out to the river.  I want to show you something.

 

 He led me through the hall of fallen heros and

 

 

 stopped for a drink at an underground creek where it comes up for air

 

 

Look straight ahead, he said. There's a deer stand leaning against the tree.  Like shooting fish in a barrel he said.

 

 

The Birds & Bees of Montana

The dog led me to a truck in the upper pasture by the bee hives.  The sign on the truck door said Ampersand Apiaries.

 

The bee keeper said he and his crew were "gonna scrape honey."

  "Those bees'll be mad as hell. You better give 'em a wide berth."

The dog was already headed out.
 

 

 Higher up, the Spanish Peaks were smokey from forest fires.

 

 

The beekeepers stirred up the bees while we took the long way down.  

 

 

 
Alongside the road something was in the bush.

 

 A wild chicken.  Look real close and you'll just see a second wild chicken on the left, not much more than a splodge of color.  We'd seen a half dozen near here in the spring and thought they'd escaped from barnyard a couple of miles away.  We thought they wouldn't last a night with the coyotes, foxes, eagles and owls.  But they did.  The original chicken was a jungle fowl in South Asia.  So they can survive. Maybe they've been here for generations.  Although it's hard to see how they could survive a winter.

 

500 feet overhead, a red tailed hawk said those chickens look like lunch

A Playground for the Mind

A Clyde Aspevig painting looks as if it were a picture of reality. Which it is, if you believe there is such a thing. 

A stroke of blue paint alters the shape of the hill, the importance of the pond, and the dark passages in the middle of the forest. Painting is layer on layer of color, light, shape, relationships and thought. And what seemed real at first glance is as abstract as a Diebenkorn up close. 

 

Painting, he said, is "a playground for the mind."
 

If you have the good fortune to be in Bozeman this week, there's a three day exhibition of Clyde Aspevig's paintings at the Emerson.